Blog na Gaeilge

About four months ago now Irishionary.com (previously IrishDictionary.org) / FocloirGaeilge.ie launched as a new collaborative dictionary for the Irish language community. The aim of the site is to facilitate the building of an open collaborative dictionary available to the Irish language community.  I haven’t worked out the details, but I want to make the database freely available (under a suitable license).

So the whole idea here is that users search the dictionary… If the word is found, great, it is shown to the user. If no matches are found, the user is asked if they would like to add that word to the dictionary if they know the translation for it. It gets added as non-validated to the database so that it is later validated by a site member who has that permission.

Basic stats. There are 2,594 Irish “headwords” in the dictionary. A headword is basically a unique string like “madra” or “scoil“. A headword can have multiple meanings, which the site calls “word entries”. There are 2,800 word entries in the database.

People submit everything and anything. As much as I could, I tried to write the wording on the pages to guide people into adding words into the database if they knew the translation.  Ok, let’s look at the last 15 *Irish* headwords added to the dictionary:

dúirt
doire
salus
emphasize
josh
an
unwise
cuirm
goog morning ruth
sorry
i am very well
sweater
ma chara
symphony
muintir

You see, this is a validation pain, for want of a better term. “emphasize” is not an Irish word. “josh” is not an Irish word”. “goog morning ruth” not an Irish word, far from it!

Validation so far – quite promising. The initial stats are quite promising, I think.  Of the 2,800 word entries, 844 have been validated either by myself or my sister (who I have working on the site a couple of hours a week). Each word entry can have multiple English language translations, giving us 1,182 validated English translations for those 844 headwords.

Big realisation: we have to close the compltely open-style wiki. So here I am with 30% of the word entries validated. If we’re able to validate 100 word entries a week, we’ll probably never reach the end of the queue, as there are always new words being added by visitors. While the quality of the added words are very good from the handful of registered users, unfortunately the vast majority of content added by non-registered users cannot be used in a dictionary. That does not take away from the visitors who do enter valid words!

The conclusion. In the future, the dictionary wiki feature will be closed to non-registered visitors. People will be welcome to register, but the cost (effort) of registration will definitely mean a focusing on quality content.

Search stats may be (part of) the future. I want to say go raibh maith agat to everyone who has been using the dictionary. The site currently has 1,000 daily visits, which shows demand is out there for a proper solution. There were a huge 110,000 searches in the past month. With this data, we can prioritise the addition of words that are in high demand that are yet to be added to the foclóir. In the meantime, users are welcome to add words that are of interest to them personally.

You can visit the dictionary through the English language interface at Irishionary.com or bain úsáid as as Gaeilge ar FocloirGaeilge.ie.